**Opening comment**

Submitting a very rough draft is never a good idea. You have written a story, which means you have wrestled with a beast. In the state of a very rough draft, you haven't wrestled with it nearly enough. And it's unlikely to be helpful to you to read what happens when others try wrestling it.

I'll start things off by commenting on your story as I read it for the first time.

**First pass**

I'll agree right away that this is abstract. There are poems and introspective vignettes. Then we're suddenly in a Japanese rockabilly bar and it took quite some time to get there. Everything is vague.

You don't split dialogue into paragraphs when there are two separate speakers; this can be confusing to the reader.

The dream-like sequences are, well, *dream-like*. Remember last time someone told you about the dream they had last night? It was absolutely fascinating, wasn't it?

I'm reminded of Murakami. Dream-like sequences, pop-culture references, an encounter with a strange 

[1744] Future Halcyon Days